1. Be kind to others. If a hot-button topic is touched on, speak charitably to those you're disagreeing with. Don't make negative generalizations about men/women or any group of people defined by genetics, nationality, etc. If you want to make sweeping negative statements about a group defined by behavior, like pimps or journalists, that's more acceptable, but try to be calm and analytic about why a behavior is negative.
Speaking of journalists, I used to comment on Slate Star Codex, a science/philosophy blog run by a pseudonymous San Francisco psychiatrist who deleted it because a New York Times journalist declared that he was going to doxx him. I'm against that.
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ReplyDeleteI mused of starting an exile community (although , as a nobody, I do not think I would be able to attract many people) and the picture I was musing on using was The Raft of the Medusa by Géricault. Your choice is much better: defiant, instead of bleak. I guess you chose it as a cryptic way to reference the choice words you would like to write to the Sultans regarding their treatment of our favorite psychiatrist, right? I seldom commented there but I loved to observe the community... Were you also the author of some great effort-posts on the Bronze Age Collapse and indo-european haplogroups? Those would be good entries for your blog, too...
ReplyDeleteWelcome and thank you! My Bronze Age history posts are now up as a single essay (going to add sections on the Levant and the Hittites).
DeleteThe haplogroup posts were also me and they're my next project to add.
As to the painting, I'm just now learning blogspot and wanted a history painting, to symbolize my ethos (love of history and high art), equal to or only slightly greater than blogspot's desired 637 pixel width. I was browsing Wikimedia Commons as a convenient source of history paintings in multiple resolutions, and when I say Repin's Cossacks, all I could think was "... yes."
That was a good choice.
DeleteYikes. This really looks like a good migration place, but I don't know if I want to use my Google account, as it has weird settings that sometimes expose my real name. Let's see if it does on this post.
ReplyDeleteOK, it does allow you to use a handle for this. Good to know.
DeleteYeah, I'm a bit leery of that myself. On the other hand, to be entirely honest a part of me is tempted to deliberately de-anonymize myself in an act of solidarity/challenge. Probably not tactically prudent, but the impulse is there. -Trofim Lysenko, in case I can't get the handle working correctly
DeleteWelcome! Thanks for letting me know the issues with Google. It looks like you both got around them, CatCube, Lysenko.
DeleteI made a new account with a fake name...
ReplyDeleteThe issue is I don't know if that would sign me out of everything else where I use the Google account.
DeleteUnless there's a regular Blogspot one that's not affiliated with Google? I would prefer that, since I'm trying to migrate away from Google after The Federalist fiasco, including in e-mail, but I didn't see another option on the page, or at least it wasn't in an obvious place.
Le Maistre chat one mused about no one wanting to have a chat about Le Maistre. I confess the little I know of him is whatever one can gather from the Wikipedia summary. Can our host explain what they like about this writer?
ReplyDeleteThe Comte de Maistre was a Catholic rationalist whose beliefs were formed by the end of the world as he knew it (the French Revolution). His family had, in part, emigrated from France as tradesmen and been granted a title of nobility in Savoy. They lost their property in both France and Savoy when a French Revolutionary army "liberated Chambéry for the Italians" in 1792. So to him, traditional society was cosmopolitan and nationalism was the dangerous new idea.
DeleteSummaries of his thought often say, confusingly, that he was against rationalism. In fact, he was on the Rationalist side of the R vs. Empiricism debate. I could cheekily call him the *last* rationalist, because in the history of philosophy that conflict is said to have ended with Kant, whom Maistre could have read but complained about needing to learn both German and Kant's jargon. :)
What I like about him is that his writing was unafraid to confront the darkest facts about the world and draw logical conclusions based on them (start with his St. Petersburg Dialogues for this). There was this attitude in his lifetime, based directly on Rousseau's sentimentalism, that what made one a nice public intellectual was saying nice things. This was a facade it apparently took a conservative to see through: Edmund Burke, a generation older than Maistre, raged upon reading Rousseau's Confessions (where he mentions giving the four infants he sired up for adoption), "How many admire the sentimental writer! The affectionate father is hardly known in his parish."
Maistre himself was an affectionate father, who was pained to spend 15 years apart from his family as the King of Sardinia's Ambassador to Russia. He was known as a prejudiced Catholic but also a good friend to people who disagreed with him. One of my more amusing discoveries is the diary of future US President John Quincy Adams when he was Ambassador to Russia during the Napoleonic Wars: Maistre was the person at court who put the most effort into befriending him.
The underlying logic of his thought is that the world is full of bloodshed. If it's an empirical fact that people kill those who disagree, what could be more fundamental than death, to make Argument Ad Baculum a fallacy rather than empirically the best argument? His answer was "God, the source of our inborn ideas." (You can say Darwin made this truth claim obsolete, but then we just have to engage with the same premises about death and empiricism from a different angle.)
I don't quite get what you mean by ". If it's an empirical fact that people kill those who disagree, what could be more fundamental than death, to make Argument Ad Baculum a fallacy rather than empirically the best argument? " Can you please rephrase that?
DeleteHello, fellow SSC Expats! Looking forward to see what you post, LMC, as I've always enjoyed your effortposts even if I've rarely participated in their subthreads as I rarely had anything of particular value to add.
ReplyDeleteThank you. That motivates me to do more even if I don't see you commenting each time.
DeleteI guess I'll be the guy to dip my toe in the pool here with a CW topic...
ReplyDeleteDoes the current round of statue smashing remind anybody else of religious iconoclasm, like the Taliban with the Buddha statues?
I've had to resist the impulse to ask people if they wouldn't consider just carving out the eyes of the statues.
Twitter mobs going out into the physical world to smash statues reminds me more of mobs of radical Reformers smashing statues in the 16th century, because the Reformation happened through the new communications tech of the printing press (to his credit, Martin Luther was horrified).
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